Why I left Google to join Grab – Steve Yegge https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-grab-86dfffc0be84

I finally gave in and started an account on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/news

A new era of batteries spells trouble for gas in America - Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/a-new-era-of-batteries-spells-trouble-for-natural-gas-in-america

Debian GNU/Linux Now Available for WSL In The Windows Store - Bleeping Computer https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/linux/debian-gnu-linux-now-available-for-wsl-in-the-windows-store/

I have been using Ubuntu on the WSL for a long time now. I don't even have the "current" version (on the Windows side; the Ubuntu system itself is up-to-date 16.04). I'm not sure if I will swap Ubuntu for Debian at this point because Ubuntu is working, and with a console-only system the differences are not as noticeable.

Debian GNU/Linux for WSL now available in the Windows Store – Microsoft: I didn't think that Debian would "beat" Fedora to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, but it did. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/03/06/debian-gnulinux-for-wsl-now-available-in-the-windows-store/

For two months, I got my news from print newspapers. Here's what I learned. - The New York Times: Of all the links I posted this week, read this one. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/technology/two-months-news-newspapers.html

Amazon has a fix for Alexa’s creepy laughs - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/3/7/17092334/amazon-alexa-devices-strange-laughter

Florida lawmakers vote to stay in Daylight Saving Time all year long - CNN https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/07/us/florida-year-round-daylight-saving-time-trnd/index.html

Thomas Guide maps: The rise and fall of Los Angeles' directional holy grail - AirTalk, 89.3 KPCC (FYI to non-Angelenos and Generation Z -- we ALL used to have a copy of this hefty map book in our cars) http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2018/03/07/62065/thomas-guide-maps-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-los-ang/

The NYT writes an obit for Ada Lovelace, the mathematician who wrote the first computer program https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/obituaries/overlooked-ada-lovelace.html

JavaFX will be removed from the Java JDK - InfoWorld https://www.infoworld.com/article/3261066/java/javafx-will-be-removed-from-the-java-jdk.html

The future of JavaFX and other Java client roadmap updates - Oracle Java Platform Group, Product Management Blog https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/the-future-of-javafx-and-other-java-client-roadmap-updates

I'm going through The Racket Guide @racketlang https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/index.html

Is loneliness a health epidemic? - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/opinion/sunday/loneliness-health.html

People don't actually know themselves very well, according to science - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/03/you-dont-know-yourself-as-well-as-you-think-you-do/554612/

Why being a loner may be good for your health - BBC http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180228-there-are-benefits-to-being-antisocial-or-a-loner

I wanted to buy this domain, but I just learned that it costs $19,888: http://racketeer.com/. This one is a relative bargain at $3295: http://theracketeer.com. Maybe I'll get a .io ... or go for something completely different.

I am playing with http://racket-lang.org, and I don't know how deep I will want to go with it.

The DrRacket IDE is refreshingly simple, and already I've been able to figure out how to scrape a web page and grab elements with a regex. Getting the development environment set up is world's easier than with Clojure (though I've been dabbling in Zach Oakes Nightcode https://sekao.net/nightcode to get a feel for that language).

Pros for Racket include that its team cares about desktop GUIs, the documentation is excellent, and there's a great static-blog compiler called Frog https://github.com/greghendershott/frog. Cons: Not a lot of people are using Racket for non-academic purposes. But the lack of a Ruby Nokogiri-like library made me learn a new regex pattern that I'm probably going to use in my Ruby app BlogPoster to eliminate Nokogiri as a dependency. (Related side note: the Ruby Twitter Gem is a HUGE dependency that I probably should be more focused on ditching, and if I implemented this app in Racket, I'd have to do without it. In Clojure, I could probably lean on a native library, or use something from Java.)

I have not been excited about Twitter recently. My BlogPoster script allows me to create entries and NOT post them to Twitter, and I may do that a bit this week. Whether they're on Twitter or not, my social updates are at http://stevenrosenberg.net/updates/.

Working with URLs in Racket - Luis Quintanilla: I fired up DrRacket and gave this a try, and it's as easy as it looks. Needless to say, this kind of thing is exactly what I'm looking for. http://luisquintanilla.herokuapp.com/2017/12/13/working-with-urls-racket/

The Racket Manifesto http://felleisen.org/matthias/manifesto/

I just discovered the @fngeekery podcast by @stevenproctor and downloaded a bunch of episodes. Looks great so far. https://www.functionalgeekery.com

A programmable programming language (it's Racket) - Communications of the ACM https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/3/225475-a-programmable-programming-language/fulltext

Lisp is for lovers | lisp.sh http://lisp.sh/

Racket comes with DrRacket, a simple-to-use IDE that lets you "choose" a Racket language and make stuff happen pretty quickly https://racket-lang.org/

Racket, which is a Scheme, which is a Lisp, can do a desktop GUI: The Racket Graphical Interface Toolkit http://docs.racket-lang.org/gui/index.html

Inside the OED: Can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the Internet? - The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/23/oxford-english-dictionary-can-worlds-biggest-dictionary-survive-internet